Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing

There is a constant refrain in the marketing industry and it’s this: That many marketers are brilliant at what they do, but very few are brilliant at marketing the actual profession to the CEO, CFO, boards and executive peers.

Lying at the heart of this issue is marketing’s persistently problematic commercial nous and its all-too-commonly crippling ability to connect the dots on what it does to business strategy, growth and outcomes.

“It’s something that does frustrate me generally about marketing as a practice: The attribute would be the notion of commercial curiosity. By that I mean a deep commitment to really understanding the commercial contribution of marketing and how every interaction and activity contributes to the bottom line,” says Stuart Tucker, former Hourigan Partner, chief customer officer of Hipages and senior executive in brand, sponsorship and marketing at Commonwealth Bank, Aussie Home loans and Optus before that.

“Too often, marketers are guilty of not really knowing the flow of money and not really knowing how they contribute to that. And they use it as a bit of a bit of an excuse, saying no one really understands me at the boardroom or the CFO wants to cut my budget all the time. To nurture a genuine commercial curiosity would be one attribute I would encourage every marketing team to get stuck into.”

Per recent figures from an Australian Marketing Institute survey, 69 per cent of marketers admit they need better financial fluency and only 12 per cent feel confident interpreting financial data. In addition, only 35 per cent of marketers say they’re working regularly with the finance department.

This juxtaposition of what marketing does and commercial delivery is also a frustration point for Nicki Kenyon, one-time CMO of Visit Victoria. A former director of Nine Powered, APAC regional lead for Mastercard and business partner for Meta, Kenyon is now a chair and non-executive director for Big4 Holiday Parks and Australian Grand Prix and sits on the Fenwick Software board.

“It is the bugbear in my career and continues to be, and it would be simply this: Marketing needs to be linked to business outcomes, and be a driver of growth every single time,” she says. “Marketing for marketing's sake is just irresponsible and wrong. If there isn't a clear business goal, then why are we doing?”  

In this latest Mi3 podcast episode, these two rare individuals to have trodden the boards as practising marketers, as well as executives, advisors, educators and board members, explore why we’re still having to defend marketing’s role, budgets and strategy. They also reflect on the big shifts in marketing they’ve lived through that have made it both easier and harder to set and meet expectations of modern marketing effectiveness.

Both Tucker and Kenyon, for instance, urge marketing leaders to sidle up to their CFO tomorrow. “Work with, not against, the finance team. They can and will be your best friend,” said Kenyon. “We've got the tools, we've got the passion, we've got the vision. We can do everything a CFO wants and needs us to do. But instead of working with finance, we tend to work against finance because they're the ones that can cut us off.

“The number of times I've discovered the disconnect between a business strategy and a marketing strategy – it’s mind-numbing that those two things are not absolutely linked.”

Neither Tucker nor Kenyon has any time for the delineation between brand and performance marketing either. Tucker labels such distinction “absolute rubbish”.

“They work in concert, they work together. If your brand is good, your performance works harder. If your performance is good, your brand works harder,” he comments. “I saw it at Hipages: We saw a significant increase in brand metrics and a significant decrease on our reliance on performance.”

For Kenyon, the distinction made between brand and performance is commonly clouding effectiveness. “The depths of academia that dive into analysis and hypotheses and all the data on this stuff, particularly led by people who have never a day spent their lives in a practicing marketer's seat, is generating a lot of hype, it's generating a lot of conversation, and it's generating a lot of revenue for those companies that are specialising in attribution and metrics,” she argues.

“It's important, but it's a double-edged sword. Again, it comes back to what are we trying to achieve: What is the goal? The goal, for example, is not reach. Reach is a media buying tool. It is not in and of itself a goal. So naming what the goals are, then defining what the metrics are to measure the effectiveness of what you're doing in pursuit of business goal is the crux of it.”

All this and a lot more wisdom through the mics – tune into the latest Mi3 podcast here.